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While Leon Ma. Guerrero “was reputedly the highest-paid prewar journalist while writing for the Philippine Free Press, where he often skewered upper-crust Manila,” writes Cathy Cañares-Yamsuan on Inquirer.net, many folks today know LMG for either of two things: 1) for writing the famous Rizal biography The First Filipino or 2) for translating Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
We tell you this because the Filipinas Heritage Library is celebrating LMG’s birth centenary with an exhibit called “History in 100 Tweets.” It will open tomorrow, March 24 — his actual birthday, BTW — and will go on until April 12.
The exhibit, according to the Inquirer report is the idea of LMG’s son, David, him of advertising BBDO Guerrero-fame. It came to him while he was going through his father’s works.
The exhibit “imagines how he may have tried to reach today’s generation and distill some of his writing into the 140-character platform we have become so familiar with,” Guerrero was quoted as saying. “He wrote the translations of ‘Noli’ and ‘Fili’ for the modern reader, so it got me thinking what today’s modern reader would be looking for.”
When Inquirer asked David how he thinks his father would react to current events, David said: “I’m sure he would always be on the side of the Philippines and Filipinos, although he would not be uncritical of current events. Perhaps that’s why it’s interesting to look at his view on the past. We can judge more objectively, and maybe allow ourselves to consider how much has changed, or if things really changed at all.”
